East West Link gone but travel problems remain

The full East West Link business case gives us a fascinating and detailed view of a future for Melbourne that Victorians turned their backs on last month.

Despite 9000 pages of analysis and argument, the case for the road rests on one simple and generally agreed problem: Melbourne's east and west are poorly connected, making travel between the two slow and difficult.

Yet the solution is anything but simple, as the comprehensive business case cannot help but reveal.

For a start, building a new road to relieve traffic in one place creates traffic problems elsewhere.

Build a six-kilometre road to fix the bottleneck at the end of the Eastern Freeway and watch new snarls form on other vital roads such as CityLink as traffic is channelled into the new tunnel.

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"The project is expected to benefit a number of users," the business case states, "However, at the same time, it will increase traffic at already congested locations (on the Eastern and Tullamarine freeways in particular), which erodes the overall project benefit-cost ratio."

The business case's proposed solution, embraced by the former Napthine government, was to widen the Eastern and Tullamarine freeways, which would have kept the gridlock at bay but only for a few years.

Elsewhere, the business case has this to say on winners and losers: "While East West Link users are expected to receive considerable benefits from using the project, the other CBD-oriented traffic is likely to receive a disbenefit due to marginally increased travel times created by the additional traffic."

This second point, that building the East West Link would probably make congestion worse for citybound traffic, suggests the losers would have outnumbered the winners, as evidenced by traffic modelling for the road.

Just 13 per cent of traffic that exits the Eastern Freeway in the morning peak is bound for the western suburbs or Melbourne Airport, compared to 27 per cent headed for the CBD, 27 per cent for the inner north and 6 per cent to suburbs south of the Yarra River.

Yet the document argues that to say this proves the East West Link is not needed "is a narrow view of a very complex problem".

The poor east-west connectivity the road is meant to fix is itself a disincentive to crosstown travel, as people opt instead for the overstretched M1 south of the city or choose not to travel at all because of the time it costs.

"It could be mistakenly concluded from this data that there is no increased demand for east-west movements north of the CBD. However … the road network through the inner north is already congested to such an extent that little or no extra traffic can pass through it," the business case states.

So yes, the East West Link is dead and the business case that was intended to promote its merits contains reams of evidence to suggest Melbourne dodged a bullet with its passing.

But the city still has an east-west travel problem and the road's cancellation doesn't bring us any closer to solving it.